Stan Ridgway
Dirty Three
Tivoli Hotel
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Stan Ridgway’s set at the Tivoli would have had the significance of the Second Coming – if he’d ever been a first time. Among the modest sized crowd, gathered on day seven of the century celsius, were ticket holders from the cancelled Stan show slated for February 1987. Ten years and one day it has taken us to get to Adelaide, Stan bellows good-naturedly. Yessiree Bob. We may have lost our premolars, fifteen percent of our hearing, John Martin’s department store and several levels of Moodies ratings since then, but Stan Ridgway’s Quintet brought us momentary forgetfulness of all of life’s tribulations.
Stan led with the great ones. The Big Heat, I Wanna be a Boss, Can’t Stop the Show, his voiceover singing style forever cool but, as ever, counterpointed by a deadpan carnie wit. With his necktie loosened and a cigarette in his hand, he hunches over the mike while a naked light bulb swings above his head like a scene from Sam Spade.
His band plays fast and loud and the acoustic mix is splendid. From Black Diamond, there’sWild Bill Donovan, founder of the CIA, sung like a heroic western ballad with harmonica garnishes and jaunty mocking choruses- American tabloid rockabilly. Big Dumb Town is another Ridgway signature. You’re a little too smart for a big dumb town. Big keyboard sweeps from Stan’s significant other, Pietra Wexstun, thudding bass from David Sutton. And Joe Berardi’s faultless drumming is like money in the bank. Stan is strumming on his Fender 12 string and lead guitarist Mark Schulz transmutes electricity into liquid glory.
If anything the standards have only gained over time- especially with the kind of octane Stan is able to summon in a room temperature of a hundred and five. Overlords is Woody Guthrie rock and roll, the kitsch weepie, Camouflage , sounds like a giant engine, and then there’s that steal from Robert Creeley’s micropoem- Drive She Said. Also, for true followers of the Stannard canon, from the wailing Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio.
The Quintet plays two encores – Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, Ring of Fire from the old Cash converter himself, and new songs Passenger and Crystal Palace. Ridgway doesn’t miss a beat, even the band seems incredulous at his energy and his salesman antics, sweet-talking the crowd like a defrocked TV evangelist. Ridgway is the James Ellroy of music. Check out his Drywall Project and other recent stuff now available through TWA records, Stan Ridgway is a continuing renaissance. For the final encore he gives us Jack Talked Like a Man on Fire. So, let me tell you, did Mr Ridgway. And yessiree Bob, I’ll be going back to hear him any old decade he happens to be passing through.
A band we may not see so often in future, judging by the demand in the US especially, is Dirty Three. When they are not being listed in US Rolling Stone’s best top five albums for last year or appearing on the Lollapalooza circuit, violinist Warren Ellis is touring, with increasing frequency, as a member of Nick Cave’s pod of Bad Seeds.
In a packed-out hot Sunday arvo set at the Tivoli, instrumentalists Dirty Three play their extraordinary blend of jazz grunge ragas. Led by Ellis, a frenetic gargoyle who looks like a cross between Marty Feldman and Christina Rossetti, the three – Jim White on drums and Mick Turner on guitar – they huddle down into a series of improvisations. Like ripples in a pond their modal, almost ambient sound gathers pace and intensity until before we know it we are in the eye of one of Warren Ellis’s melodic hurricanes, a place both terrifying and exhilarating.
Leaning at the microphone, Ellis introduces each piece with paragraph length titles that seem, like the music itself, to have just settled on him like some strange creature of pentecost- I Knew it Would Come to This, or I Really Miss You a Lot. Some have profane subtitles. All are accompanied by some likeably rambling front bar wisdom from Warren before he drapes his pale skinny arms back around his battered looking violin and plays something else spectacularly lyrical and psychotic.
The Three play tracks from Horse Stories- Hope, and the long elegy, Sue’s Last Ride. Turner blows his amp part way through the ride and the band stop for repairs. Ellis fills in with a spirited reel, reminding us that swirling around in the Dirty mix is a lot of traditional Celtic sound as well.
Dirty Three play Leonard Cohen, a fragile reading of Suzanne and a dervish-like Indian Love Song. Another, also from their debut album, we heard at last year’s Big Day Out- Everything is Fucked . Listening to it, you wouldn’t think so. Ellis closes with another Horse Story, Warren’s Lament. The encore- and the crowd is in the mood for many more -is The Dirty Equation.
I’m not sure how to factor this equation. Under all that stolly- guzzling and ordinary bloke-iness Dirty Three are a very un-ordinary band. Their music gathers the imagination of Sugarcane Harris, Ornette Coleman, the free jazz movement, cajun and Irish music and the dark genius of electric rock. The Dirty Equation is postmodern mathematics – and, as someone once said, it makes a beautful set of numbers.
The Adelaide Review, April, 1997.